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Insult To Injury: When Urgent Health Care Is Based On Your Race

February is National Heart Disease Awareness Month. Not all patients with heart disease are treated equally.

For my mother, healing is less of an action and more of an instinct. As a stay at home mom, she was a caretaker for her family— nuclear and extended— for nearly ten years. For as long as I can remember, there had been no cut left without a Band-Aid, no fever left unsettled and no trip to the hospital without her ready at the bedside.

Some years down the road, she finally decided to do something for herself. When she was 38 years old, she made one of her biggest lifelong dreams come true by getting her nursing degree. I still remember crying tears of joy and pride as she walked up the aisle at her pinning ceremony and took an oath to keep her patients’ health her top priority. A promise so personal, but still so selfless — this is the epitome of who she is and what every health care provider should be.

44 million American women are living with some form of heart disease. One thing doctors always comment on is how young she is for her health to deteriorate at such an unnatural rate. But statistics from the American Heart Association show that Latinas are likely to develop heart disease ten years earlier than white women. To quite literally add insult to injury, she was diagnosed with two types — coronary artery disease and peripheral artery disease.

Having a loved one with a chronic disease is scary no matter how you cut it. For the next five years, our visits to the hospital would become more frequent, as stents placements (and replacements) were a fearful, tri-annual event. But without a doubt, some of the most terrifying and frustrating moments came when the doctors who claimed to have her best interest at heart tried to tell her that she was exaggerating the amount of pain that she had.

I attend doctor’s appointments with my mom sometimes when I can take off work. Almost every occurrence is heartbreakingly similar. I listen to my mom list off every symptom concurrent with an artery blockage, tell them she’s doing everything right as far as eating and exercise habits. They usually recommend a test in order to see if there’s a blockage. My mother promptly responds that those tests don’t work for her and that she has had blockages countless times that have gone undetected because of those tests. The doctor gets frustrated and insists on them anyway. She goes through with them. No blockages show up and the doctors flippantly say she needs to do more exercise and have her go home.

Within two weeks to a month, we’d usually be in the emergency room and they’d find a nearly 100% blockage in one of her arteries. Three of these times she’s had a heart attack. The doctors would just shrug and not even apologize for misdiagnosing her.

It baffles me to this day that doctors could not only dismiss my mother’s complaints as a patient and a Registered Nurse herself. But unfortunately, she’s not the only one with this experience. Researchers from The University of Leeds and the British Heart Foundation claim women are dying from heart attacks at an increasing rate because doctors aren’t as likely to believe them about their symptoms in comparison to men. A study from the Public Library of Science has also proven that due to the racial empathy gap, medical personnel assume that people of color feel less pain than white people and therefore do not provide them with the pain relief that is necessary. . .

2 thoughts on “Insult To Injury: When Urgent Health Care Is Based On Your Race”

I am almost at a loss for words. Sometimes, I hate coming in here because more often than not, I see something that gets my goat up, no end and this is one such instance.

A Black woman was just recently put out of a hospital(University of Maryland Medical Center in Midtown) in Baltimore, MD and the poor woman was put out in the dead of night by security while dressed in just a thin, backless hospital gown and socks. Security dropped her off at a bus stop and left her there and a man who was just leaving work, saw the whole thing and started filming it.

I am not surprised at this because of the many times that I left a crime scene and arrived at a hospital in Baltimore by ambulance, I never made it into a room. I was left in a bed in the hallway of the emergency room with the head of my bed at the door of a restroom and every time someone used the restroom, the door banged the bed I was lying on. And this occurred at Sinai Hospital in Baltimore, MD., where my Primary Care Physician was located.

It was only after I complained to my Primary Care Physician, that the next time I was carted to the hospital, they made a room available and the ‘care’ I received, I can only say that animals in veterinary hospitals, I am sure, receive better.

One of my most popular blog posts is about poor Anna Brown, a Black woman, aged 29, who went to a hospital because of pains in her legs and she refused to leave the hospital because she knew something was wrong, but since she was, apparently, homeless, the hospital called the police and she was arrested, taken to jail and collapsed and died on a jail cell floor from blood clots that traveled from her legs to her lungs. Barbara Dawson, another Black woman, died almost the same way except that after she was handcuffed at the hospital, she only made it as far as outside the hospital doors before she too, collapsed and died from blood clots traveling to her lungs, killing her and she wasn’t homeless. The hospital, in both instances, claimed no wrong doing and these deaths, they claimed, were due to ‘natural causes’. They were just ‘too’ Black. I am beyond enraged!

Shelby, I was really heartsick when I came across this article and even more so after reading your comment. I honestly don’t know what to say. It’s an absolute travesty that it’s taken people so long to speak out about this disgrace. Hopefully these incidents will give more people the courage to speak out about such events – good people need to take an absolute stand that these behaviors will not be allowed.